Weeds or Careful Cultivars? On the Growth of Social Media in Urban Wildlife Research and Relations

The exceptional growth of social media has transformed how people engage with urban wildlife, by providing new media to shape online public discourse, new methods for conservationists, and serve a tool for scientific research. However, little is known about how social media influences these areas. We performed a systematic literature review (SLR) of peer-reviewed publications that included both urban wildlife and a social media component. By doing so, we analysed how social media influences the public perception of urban wildlife, behaviour and its use to facilitate citizen science projects. We analysed (59) papers out of the original 904 identified articles with potential relevance. We found that the literature is mostly regionally focused with Asia Pacific, North America, Europe being the most represented areas. For species diversity, mammals and invertebrates dominate the literature, with a noticeable focus on species that could be deemed as charismatic, like cockatoos or species deemed troublesome, such as coyotes. The role of social media was predominantly for the facilitation of research and recruitment for citizen science. The most commonly used platform within the review was Facebook, leveraging the “groups” feature to identify and engage with relevant communities. While social media shows promise in shaping attitudes, public perception and facilitating coexistence behaviours, its effectiveness in driving real world change remains under researched. The results indicate that while social media offers unparalleled opportunities to spread wildlife awareness and engagement, which are beneficial traits to conservationists, further work is needed to mitigate its capacity to spread misinformation and temper emotionally charged online discourse.